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Building Empire on the Backs of Others: Rentierism in Early Rome
No full textAll the world knows that once upon a time Rome conquered all the world. We
have Hollywood to thank for that. The movie makers focus on the more salacious aspects
while serious historians naturally tend to periods that are well documented. Almost all of
the things that make good movies and sell books happened centuries after the city’s
mythical foundation in 754 BCE. This has resulted in relative neglect of Rome’s much
more humble beginnings. But it is worth asking: How is it that Rome, starting with such
modest means, rose to such heights? How were these early Romans, hardscrabble
farmers, malodorous goatherds, careworn matrons able to produce the means for, first,
their own protection, and then the initial, shaky steps to empire, long before they had
access to waves of tribute, booty and taxes? The natural endowments of central Italy are
such that agriculture production never rose much above subsistence levels. Precious
metals were precious few. And their neighbors? Mean and nasty as can be.
This paper is interested in the embryonic stage of that journey with a particular
and practical focus. How did the early Romans manage to bootstrap themselves out of
penury and into power? (By no means the level of power they centuries later would have,
but just enough to subdue their unruly neighbors.) I contest the notion held by many that
it was an agricultural economy that underpinned their efforts. Rather, I propose that the
Romans were, metaphorically, a great deal better at harvesting the fields of others than
tending their own. More technically, they were rentiers. They excelled at capturing
wealth created by others rather than producing it themselves. And that was of necessity. For, Rome’s elite, however roughly hewn it may have been in those earliest times, was
acquisitive in nature. Its desire to consume surpassed the society’s ability to produce,
necessitating a means of gathering wealth that bridged the gap. I argue that rentier
practices allowed it to do so, and more.
Starting with the construction of an abstract model of a rentier state, this study
relies on a multidisciplinary approach to find support for or against the notion that rentier
practices were important in early Rome. Historical, literary and epigraphical sources are
central, as are economic studies, but archeological finds and socio-anthropological
theories of state formation also shore up the research. This exercise uncovers the nuanced
nature of these practices which take forms ranging from benign to brutal, including:
assimilation, appropriation, predation, extraction, coercion. The results point to the
presence and persistence of rentier practices in early Roman society.
This research augments the understanding of wealth generation and expenditure in
early Rome by introducing an economic framework, rentierism, that offers a novel
approach to exploring those processes
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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Emperor and Physician: Plague, Politics, and Healing in the Justinianic Novels
Full text linkThe first bubonic plague outbreak, the “Plague of Justinian,” has been subject to scrutiny to determine how it impacted the cultural, political, and economic trajectory of the Byzantine Empire. Central to this debate is the question of the plague’s minimal mention in non-literary sources, particularly the “Novels,” a series of laws released by Emperor Justinian throughout his reign. In recent years, the emperor’s relative silence on the matter has been cited as evidence that the plague was not significant enough to merit a robust imperial response. While the Novels make virtually no explicit reference to plague, this paper identifies a shift in legal language during the early years of the pandemic wherein the emperor offered a series of allusions likening himself to a physician practicing his craft. These allusions are forceful in their comparative quality, declaring an equivalency of lawmaking and healing. It is the position of this paper that the emperor used his legislation as a vehicle to modify his public image, embodying the mindset of a physician to underline his virtuous philanthropy and offset criticism throughout the plague. Compared especially to his successors, Justinian’s language was uniquely deployed and represents an understudied political effect of the pandemic.Extension Studie
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The Rhetoric of PIETAS: The Pastoral Epistles and Claims to Piety in the Roman Empire
Full text linkThis dissertation reads the Pastoral Epistles alongside imperial propaganda, monumental inscriptions, and philosophical writings of the Roman period to determine how claims to piety (Greek: εὐσέβεια, Latin: pietas) advanced socio-political aims and reinforced cultural values and ideological assumptions among its audiences. Coins celebrating the pietas of the imperial households of Trajan and Hadrian, the honorary inscription of Salutaris in Ephesus, and the writings of Philo and Plutarch evidence that appeals to piety functioned rhetorically to naturalize hierarchies of power and social orders, recognize the honorable status of citizens, signal expertise in knowledge about the divine, and delineate insiders from outsiders. Moreover, the prevalence of appeals to piety indicates the virtue’s broad cultural currency and prestige, which was traded upon for legitimating authority. This dissertation argues that the author of the Pastorals strategically deploys piety in his attempt to negotiate an imperial situation marked by prejudicial perceptions of Christians as a foreign and seditious superstitio, to reinforce (gendered) social values, to intervene in Christian debates over the status and authority of benefactors in the ekklēsia, to build confidence in and solidarity around the legitimacy of his vision of the ideal ekklēsia, and to denigrate the beliefs and practices of rival teachers.Pastoral Epistles; Piety; Roman Empir
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Public Discourse and Imperial Ideology in the Annals of Tacitus
No full textThis study examines the relationship between discourse and ideology in the Annals of the Roman historian Tacitus, with a particular focus on the account of the reign of Tiberius in books 1-6. I argue that Tacitus depicts the early Principate as a political system in which the legitimacy of autocratic rule depends on the emperor’s ostensible adherence to a set of fundamental ideological assumptions, the most important of which is the autonomy (libertas) of the senate. The naturalization of these assumptions depends, in turn, on the systematic patterning of public discourse in such a way that it reproduces and affirms the terms of imperial ideology. Two main categories of discourse are considered.
The utterances of individual speakers, including the emperor, in formal settings conform quite rigidly to the official “script” of imperial politics, although Tacitus probes the vulnerabilities of this script by portraying situations in which the discursive conventions of the Principate break down, whether by accident or as a result of deliberate subversion. Moreover, the systematized dissimulation of genuine sentiment results in a political environment characterized by confusion, uncertainty, and psychological strain, and much of the narrative of the Tiberian books is devoted to an examination of the tension between the suppression of private opinion and its occasional eruption into the public realm.
On the other hand, I argue that anonymous collective discourse, particularly rumor, is largely exempt from the dynamics that constrain individual speech, and thus serves as one of the primary vehicles through which criticism of imperial ideology is articulated and disseminated in the Annals. In addition, collective discourse plays an important role in the process by which political events are interpreted and organized into coherent narratives. As a result, collective discourse represents a significant check on the ideological hegemony of the regime, and, although attempts are occasionally made to control it, Tacitus usually portrays these efforts as hopelessly futile. The autonomy of collective discourse is particularly evident in the Claudian and Neronian books of the Annals, where it manifests itself above all in the context of both formal and informal instances of public spectacle.Classic
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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